Free Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking by Erin Dionne Page A

hands!” I exclaimed. I spun, ready to race to the T, and barely heard his startled “Huh?”
    “The list!” I tossed over my shoulder. “It’s the photo album!”
    Ollie pounded the pavement behind me.

We didn’t let up our speed until we were back in my bedroom, photo album in our hands. I clicked on a Boston tunes playlist, and The Dropkick Murphys’ “Shippin’ Up to Boston” filled the room.
    “I’m shippin’ up to Bos-ton…to find my wooden leg!” we both shouted. I laughed my first real laugh in a while. Aside from the family in danger/being threatened by a psychotic redhead thing, being a quasi-detective was
fun.
    We sat on the floor, backs against my bed, and flipped the pages. Shots of Grumps, eyes crinkled, hair kaleidescoping from salt and pepper to all salt and back again, holding a hammer in almost every one, dashed by: in front of the USS
Constitution
, in a pew in a church, standing in front of Paul Revere’s house—it was like a historical tour of the city.
    “How do we know when he was working on what?” Ollie asked as my flipping became more frantic.
    I slowed turning the pages. “Good question.”
    Ollie carefully peeled back the plasticky coating on the pics and pulled out a photo of Grumps in front of Faneuil Hall. It came off the gluey paper with a slight kissing sound.
    “Bà dates the back of all the pictures she sends from Vietnam,” he said in response to my cocked eyebrow. He turned the photo over.
    Written in Nini’s black, spidery writing:
6/94.
No matter where they’re from, I guess grandmas are alike.
    “Disco,” I whispered. In that second a zillion feelings raced through me: total happiness, excitement, and—okay, I admit it—fear. Add gratefulness to Ollie’s Vietnamese grandmother to that list too.
    I grabbed a pen and pile of sticky notes off my desk.
    “What’re those for?” Ollie asked. He peeked at the back of a different picture and returned it.
    “So I can mark what picture goes where when we find the right ones,” I explained. Even though part of me was dying to just rip everything out and toss it onto the floor, the other—more rational—part remembered how important this album was to me, Nini, and Grumps. I couldn’t just tear it apart.
    Ollie and I went through each page (of course, the photos weren’t in date order), peeling off the pictures, checking the back, and re-sticking them in the book.
    Halfway through the album, none of them matched the date we needed.
    “Maybe there aren’t any in here from 1990,” I said. “I mean, wouldn’t it be kind of dangerous to have a record of where the pieces could be?”
    Ollie shrugged. “Could be. But wouldn’t that
also
tell us something?”
    Yeah, I wanted to say—it would tell us that finding themissing art was going to be way harder than we thought. But I kept that to myself.
    My butt was numb. Ollie turned a page and I tugged on a shot of Grumps standing in front of an apartment building somewhere. Half expecting another dead end, I flipped it over and saw
2/90
in Nini’s scrawl.
    Numb butt forgotten, I popped off the floor and rocked out a twirl.
    “Yeah, baby!” Ollie cheered.
    I didn’t even care that the picture was taken
before
the Gardner heist—photos from the right year existed!
    Three pages later, we had it: a shot of Grumps, standing on the stairs in front of a brick building. Squinting into the camera, he had one foot propped a step above him, hands in his pockets. And there, on the back:
3/90.
My heart thudded.
    “This could be it,” I whispered. Ollie nodded.
    “Where is it?” Ollie said. We both stared at the photo: concrete stairs, a black iron gate, blurry bricks in the background. “It looks familiar…”
    I raced to my computer, scanned the photo, and uploaded it for a Google Image search. The search wheel spun and spun…then…“Look!”
    Best guess for this image: the Massachusetts State House.
    Set back on a hill, behind a big iron fence, the state house